Professional C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0, 7th Edition

21Tasks and Parallel Programming

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• An overview of multi-threading
• Working with the Parallel class
• Working with Tasks
• Using the Cancellation framework
• Using the Data Flow Library
• Working with timers
• Understanding threading issues
• Using the lock keyword
• Synchronizing with Monitor
• Synchronizing with mutexes
• Working with Semaphore and SemaphoreSlim
• Using ManualResetEvent, AutoResetEvent, and CountdownEvent
• Working with Barrier
• Managing readers and writers with ReaderWriterLockSlim

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The Wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com on the Download Code tab. The source code is also available at https://github.com/ProfessionalCSharp/ProfessionalCSharp7 in the directory Tasks.

The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• Parallel
• Task
• Cancellation
• DataFlow
• Timer
• WinAppTimer
• ThreadingIssues
• SynchronizationSamples
• BarrierSample
• ReaderWriterLockSample

OVERVIEW

There are several reasons for using multiple threads. Suppose that you are making a network call from an application that might take some time. You don’t want to stall the user interface and force the user to wait idly until the response is returned from the server. The user could perform some other actions in the meantime or even cancel the request that was sent to the server. Using threads can help.

For all activities that require a wait—for example, because of file, database, or network access—you can start ...